I write today with some unfortunate news - my original plans for site migration and updating ended up being too expensive for our use case. I mentioned in previous posts that I had migrated all of our game data to the new data model and hosted it within AWS. This went relatively smoothly. However, over the summer, I noticed spikes of costs - up to about $350 per month JUST FOR THE DATABASE! Needless to say, this is way to much for us, nearly triple the cost of the current site. I did some tinkering and got it down to about $60 a month, which seemed much better. However, I decided to sit on doing any further updates to monitor costs for a short window. August costs looked ok, but September and October ballooned back up to about $150 just for the database. Once we add actual API requests, storage costs (for things like images), etc, this just wouldn't be cost effective for our use case.
I decided to tear down everything in AWS.
This was a good learning experience but I know its not ideal for everyone hoping for updates. Now for some better news. All the work I did on the data model and migration is still valid. I backed up all the SQL for what I had already done and all of my SQL generation code can be used to capture updates since I last migrated earlier this year. Some folks helping at the Bloop Museum have also expressed interest in helping update all the PHP code, so I'll be having a chat with them soon as well for some extra support.
I know this is quite a setback but things are still moving toward an improved RF Generation!
